The beginning is the end is the beginning*
(*Yes, that's the title of a Smashing Pumpkins song. This newsletter proved challenging to title so my husband helped. Thanks Simon.)
It’s been a few weeks since I last wrote. So many emotions surfaced for me as my course More Alive in 2025 came to an end. The way my relationship with Holosomatic Body Therapy evolved over the six weeks we were together is surprising even to me. I was well aware that this slower way of working with the techniques I’ve learned would bring new ideas to the surface and potentially create new connections, but it’s far surpassed my expectations. Most of all, it has deepened my trust and connection with my body and renewed my dedication to somatic practice.
A fundamental aspect of Holosomatic Body Therapy is letting go. We enter every activation with this intention - allowing our emotions, our stuckness, and our physical sensations to rise to the surface, to allow them to be released. We witness as our breath, movement, touch, and voice bring our attention to areas of the body where energy needs to shift. It was so beautiful to witness the deepening of trust in each participant as the weeks went by - tapping into the power of their own bodies, learning to trust their emotions and most of all, becoming their own resource - deepening their capacity to hold joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, anger and calm. I am so proud of each of them - and of myself too. I couldn’t have imagined having the capacity to create and facilitate something as powerful as this. I am grateful for the support network I have around me, especially the magic mná. Happy International Women’s Day to ye all!
One of my favourite moments of each class was choosing a poem for integration. Every week without fail I would find one that felt perfect - a miracle in and of itself. I have loved poetry forever. I started to write it when I was a very angsty teenager and even won some competitions for my writing in secondary school. I joined a few local writing groups when I still lived in Cavan and we published several anthologies. Now and then a poem will come to me but it’s not something I’ve focussed on for a long time. But I love a good poem. Someone shared recently that you shouldn’t go a week without reading a poem and I am a firm believer - although I feel like it’s more like a day than a week for me. I found this one a couple of days before More Alive in 2025 finished and it felt like a real balm to my heart as I thought of my wonderful group of women leaving.
I Wonder if I Will Miss the Moss by Jane Mead I wonder if I will miss the moss after I fly off as much as I miss it now just thinking about leaving. There were stones of many colors. There were sticks holding both lichen and moss. There were red gates with old hand-forged hardware. There were fields of dry grass smelling of first rain then of new mud. There was mud, and there was the walking, all the beautiful walking, and it alone filled me – the smells, the scratchy grass heads. All the sleeping under bushes, once waking to vultures above, peering down with their bent heads they way they do, caricatures of interest and curiosity. Once too a lizard. Once too a kangaroo rat. Once too a rat. They did not say I belonged to them, but I did. Whenever the experiment on and of my life begins to draw to a close I’ll go back to the place that held me and be held. It’s O.K. I think I did what I could. I think I sang some, I think I held my hand out.
A few things have shifted for me since More Alive in 2025 ended. I launched an online version from what I can identify now as a fear-based mindset, it certainly didn’t come from the same source as the energy I launched More Alive in 2025 with. I have decided to press pause and instead host it on The Portal, which will launch in June. Sally has created a wonderful community of experiencers and creators and I have no doubt that Embody + Release will feel right at home there. It won’t just be a weekly Zoom meeting, there’ll be a community space where we can connect and lots of extra resources to access in between our live calls.
In the meantime, I want to run another in-person version. If you’d love to join please let me know what day or time would suit you best. I am leaning towards a weekend morning! I am running a free session on March 22nd 11am-1pm at Barefoot Body & Soul Studio, thanks to funding from Nourish NI. There are only 12 spots available and you can book here - after we’ve practiced together, we’ll enjoy a light lunch. I would love to see you there.
Thanks so much for reading x